Week 3, September 12th

The first reading this week is a chapter from a book entitled “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession”, written by Dana Goldstein. The excerpt highlights many reasons why “too many schools failed to effectively educate black and low-income children” (121) during the Civil Rights Movement, and implies that the issues are still present today. Many examples are given of prejudicial views held by whites during the time of desegregation, such as the belief that black teachers were less qualified than white teachers or that white teachers assumed they had to lower their standards for black students. Black teachers were forced out of positions in favor of white teachers, which left white teachers who had little to no training on working with a “student population simultaneously fighting racism, poverty, and political disempowerment.” (121). The second half of the chapter discusses programs (particularly the Teacher Corps) that were put into place to encourage young people with an interest and a love for teaching to work in schools with impoverished children. The Teacher Corps enlisted young people from mostly middle-class upbringings to live and teach in communities that were underprivileged, with the goal of recruiting teachers who were excited to make a difference where they were rather than just yearning to teach at a higher-performing school.  

While Goldstein states that the success of the Teacher Corps program is hard to judge because back then standards for measuring student success were not in place yet, the major takeaway was that these interns truly believed that education was a “passport” to lead students out of poverty, more so than veteran, well-trained teachers did. This ideal was shared by President Johnson, who believed that students needed access to programs that would “negate the disadvantages of poverty and racism.” (116)

In the article “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, Jean Anyon describes a study that was performed in the late 70’s where observations about student work in fifth grade classrooms was collected and analyzed. The study focused on five different schools that were located in communities that differed in their social class. Anyon defines a person’s social class as “the way that person relates to the process in society by which goods, services, and culture are produced.” (68) Four different social classes are defined: working-class, middle-class, affluent professional, and executive elite. She suggests that the type of schoolwork provided in each social class coincides with the types of jobs that make up the same social class. In the working class schools, students are seen to be often told what to do- follow steps of a procedure, copy sentences from a book, “largely mechanical, rote work.” (75) Students have little choice and teachers were seen to often be in a struggle with the students over control of the classroom. In contrast, students in the executive elite schools are given much more creative freedom in their assignments. There is a focus on connecting the curriculum to local and global issues and the work helps students develop skills like analysis, reasoning, and conceptualization of complex matters. One would use these skills in a future career as a CEO of a major corporation or a top executive on Wall Street.

I found the claim that Anyon makes in her article to be very eye-opening. Even within my own school, there are differences between types of student work in the honors level versus the college preparatory level. While North Kingstown, RI is primarily an upper-middle class town, we have students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Typically, the honors classes are composed of students from the wealthier areas of town- their parents are highly involved in their education and seemed to have ingrained in their children the value of their education. My honors classes are well-behaved, which makes it easier to give them work that allows for more student choice, creative freedom, and the ability for the kids to “run wild” with their ideas. On the other hand, college preparatory classes consist of more of a range of students as far as their ability and socioeconomic status. Parent involvement is much more sparse and there are many behavioral issues in these classes. For this reason, classes are more successful when run under a tight ship- clear expectations and consequences for behavior and work that is straightforward. While I try to encourage my college prep students, especially during labs, to be curious and explore their ideas, there is always the fear of losing control of the class. I’d be curious to know what the results of this study would be if it were performed in different parts of the country, in different grade levels, and in present day.

The video I’ve chosen to include this week is a Ted Talk by Sir Ken Robinson. In his talk, Robinson describes how our educational system was built in order to meet the needs for industrialism, which may or may not be useful today with such an unpredictable future. He focuses on the idea that intelligence presents itself in diverse ways in our students and that we need to recognize this. A quote that stuck out to me was “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” This relates back to the practices of the “executive elite” classrooms in which creativity and risk-taking is encouraged. Robinson believes that our educational systems need to be reformed in order to give all students this opportunity to find their intelligence.